#aesthetics

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#art #creation #creativity #perception #self-knowledge

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. ↗

— Adam Phillips

#art #philosophy #secrets #truth #art

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it. ↗

— Theodor W. Adorno

#philosophy #art

The assignment of meanings [in music] is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling. ↗

— Susanne K. Langer

#music #philosophy #symbolism #art

High standards generally -- about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else -- far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life. ↗

— Joseph Epstein

#art #life #snobbery #art

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense. ↗

— T.J. Clark

#art #art-history #art

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness. ↗

— Clarice Lispector

#art #beauty #good #truth #art

You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it. ↗

— Bret Easton Ellis

#bret-easton-ellis #life #transgressive #beauty

I think it's more accurate to think of aesthetics as a key ingredient in a recipe, as opposed to the icing on the cake. ↗

— Stephen P. Anderson

#interaction-design #ixd #user-experience #ux #design

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds, ↗